Introduction: Novel subjects, sovereignty, and the law -- Intimacy, survival, resistance: Daniel Defoe's A journal of the plague year -- Body, consent, survival: Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, or, A history of a young lady -- Sovereign politeness: David Hume's History of England -- Sovereign domesticity: Edward Gibbon's The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire -- The witness and the law: Ann Radcliffe's The Italian -- Epilogue: The novel and political modernity: beyond liberalism.
